Posted on 09/26/2011 8:19:38 PM PDT by Sick of Lefties
The rich are those who have made a lot of money. There are many ways to do that, especially in our system, and not all of them are crooked. Some are, few, I think. It’s the government route—the well traveled path of public servants—that troubles me the most. Just my predilection.
All people are flawed, rich and poor alike. We’re all sinners born with original sin. We all have our fights. Some fight better, or worse, than others, regardless of money. Wealth just accentuates the struggle, and draws attention to it. It doesn’t change the primordial fact; it just raises the stakes.
Ayn Rand saw one thing clearly: government compassion is tyranny. Thomas Aquinas anticipated her by a millennium: Justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is corruption.
She suspected, perhaps rightly, that at the root of government compassion lied the self-interested action of people seeking to instrumentalize collective power in order to line their pockets.
I never had much time for objectivism, or the notion of selfishness as a virtue. She didn’t understand the social nature of man.
She had grave kinks. That her passion scenes were bloody and violent seemed indicative to me. She referred to herself as “men like me.”
She was woman ahead of her times in ways I wish temporality had never caught up to.
With respect to learning, I’m always open to it. Quite often I have reason to thank others for their help.
All the best. Thanks for the praise.
And surely you know I'm not nitpicking. I think it matters -- alot -- and for the reasons I stated.
Here's the irony of Rand, that I doubt you'll hear anywhere else: Marx argued that man's lower nature would doom capitalism to be overtaken by communism, with socialism as an interim stage on the path.
Rand espoused a vision of capitalism that barred the very virtues given us to master the lower nature. And her ideas were deeply revered by influential people, and more widely so than probably acknowledged.
She propagated the very form of secular capitalism that Marx said would doom capitalism to socialism, and then communism.
Rand had her day. And here we are.
There's one major flaw in Warren's argument -- it doesn't explain business failures.
If a business' success isn't due to the owner's efforts so much as it is from externalities such as police, fire protection, infrastructure, education and so on, no business would fail, since all businesses use them fairly equally. But the fact is, every day, there are businesses that do fail. If what Warren said was true, these same externalities would have to be responsible for those as well. Though, I doubt that people like Warren are willing to accept that part of the bargain.
That means that something other than these externalities must be the deciding factor. The owner's efforts.
Great point. Wish I’d thought of it.
I’ll grant that she’s right that nobody succeeds in a vacuum. We’re all social creatures. That is insufficient for business success, as you point out, however.
The galling point is that her Party is the party of the isolated, autonomous individual. She’s a hypocrite to rediscover man’s social nature when it’s time to pay the bills for her autonomous decision-makers on the government dole in the various states.
Unfortunately, “moderate” Scott Brown lacks the moral authority to point it out, as he’s bought into her premises.
“was the remark about the rich not getting that way by stealing from others (I paraphrase from memory) — which I believe is true in the large part but can by no means be accepted as unchanging truth”
That’s about it. In a capitalist economy, people get rich by satisfying other’s needs and expanding productive capacity, not by making them poor so as to prey on them more easily. That’s what Statists do through the agency of big government, which is why the USSR collapsed and why the USA will too if we don’t change.
I realize that there are many caveats and limiting variations on this theme, e.g., scammers, cronyism, cabals, corporatism. It was just the tag end of sentence meant to underscore a general truth, not the proclamation of an unchanging truth.
“Marx argued that man’s lower nature would doom capitalism to be overtaken by communism, with socialism as an interim stage on the path.”
Marx was not a prophet. He was an astute critic (and an impudent one at that). The accuracy of his predictions might have as much to do with the attractiveness of his ideas (to a certain type of person) for political rather than technological solutions to man’s social problems, and to the machinations of the Communist Party (and offshoots) that his Manifesto inspired, than to his prescience or analysis.
I found Pope Benedict’s discussion of Marx’s influence interesting in points 20, 21 of “Spe Salvi” (Saved in Hope (2007)). You might, too (see, www.vatican.va). He concludes on this note: “[Marx] forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment.”
It appears that Marx made the same mistake as Rand.
I take your point about Rand’s incapacitating the virtues necessary to forestall evil. We agree. She made a virtue of vice, selfishness specifically, which is a losing proposition in the long run. Character is with us always. Nobody can be a pig in his business life without consequence to his life overall. And pigs, just like Orwell’s, are more suited to power lust than to freedom.
That is not to say that the pursuit of self-interest makes one a pig, which is why I’m a capitalist despite Rand’s excesses.
There are things about her I like. Her critique, like Marx’s is devastating. Perhaps we could say that the negative sides of each one’s oeuvre is penetrating. The positive sides are flawed, incomplete and dangerous if taken as gospel.
As an aside, your remarks suggested a different way to look at her, and Marx: through the lens provided by Alasdair MacIntyre in “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?”
Victory vies with Excellence as alternative grounding concepts for human action and moral evaluation. Each provides meaning to virtues such as justice or temperance. Both systems make reference to those words; they simply mean different things in each system. What is a virtue in one may be a vice in the other.
He argues that Excellence is the appropriate grounding mechanism, and that traditions arising out of Victory-centeredness are problematic on several grounds. Both Rand and Marx arise out of the latter.
Anyway, look, capitalism is just another "ism." The right for freely consenting adults to own and dispose of private property according to their own lights is quite provided for by "thou shalt not steal," and insisted upon in the declaration of independence, and probably in some other places like the Magna Carta that you'd know about but I wouldn't. An "ism" can't even approach it, and only diminishes it by reducing it from what it really is -- a dimension of liberty.
Capitalism -- imho -- is an ideal at best, an abused buzzword at worst. All ideals are imperfect and limited. Like "Darwinism," it's an attempt to secularize a law of nature -- to dethrone God. I think its time for thinking people to acknowledge that.
Atlas Shrugged woke me up when I was 21 -- right about the time it was waking everyone else up. It was good for that.
Rand was, like so many "atheists," obsessed with Christ, whether she knew it or not. Her hero was Christlike. Her Utopia was a 'promised land.' Unfortunately, ideals -- unachievable paradigms necessarily limited in dimension and therefore unreal -- are all atheist have. Marx was an idealist, too. Idealists always lead astray. Malcom X was an idealist. So was Hitler. Idealists are currently destroying America.
The real world is so much more cooperative to human welfare, if only they'd get their idealistic boots off its neck.
Glad to trade ideas with you. I never read long posts -- yours was an exception. Well done. The articulation of the argument about who pays for and who benefits from education was brilliant and needful.
“gawd you’re deep. Ouvre?”
Naw. I just know a few foreign words.
“Anyway, look, capitalism is just another “ism.” “
Fair enough, as will all that follows it.
Capitalism is the economic ordering of social life that corresponds to the political ordering of Liberty. Michael Novak wrote cogently about the third leg of this tripod, a Pluralistic cultural-moral sphere. Over the years, I have come to appreciate his position, and to think of these three legs—Capitalism, Libety, Pluralism—as delimiting American exceptionalism.
I read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead in my teens and was profoundly influenced by them. I remember feeling swelled up with the sensation of a Francisco D’Ancona or Howard Roarke, even as I joined the sexual revolution, decried my evil, racist country and bought into every communist idea the zeitgeist was pedaling. The decades, life, etc. have taught me the dual folly of my youth.
“Glad to trade ideas with you. I never read long posts — yours was an exception. Well done. The articulation of the argument about who pays for and who benefits from education was brilliant and needful.”
It’s been a pleasure dialoging with you. Thanks for the compliment.
I see myself more as Ragnar Daneskjold these days.
OK, without recanting the more mysterious view of economics that I posted, I understand that it can be useful, oh, I suppose it's necessary, to expound the concept and offer an intellectual rationale for it. But that process is a derivative of the thing itself, a snapshot, a static representation. I guess like the Bible is -- it's a static articulation of The Living Word. And as we know, subject, in its limited nature, to infinite interpretations and misunderstandings.
But the real thing is alive, has a reliable, unchanging character, but is ultimately never fully grasped rationally.
The outlaw who becomes the policeman out to rob the thieving poor to restore the productive rich.
It took a Robin Hood President and Congress to make many feel that way.
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